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How to Choose SEO Firms

Executive Summary

Choosing a great SEO firm is like choosing any service: Look at years-in-business, the client list, references, and proof of results.

Still, consider a promising young firm, not only well-established firms like DISC. Despite the importance of a firm's track record, we at DISC know that there are and will be many eager and talented people just starting out who have done their homework. This industry needs more such people, and we encourage you to give newcomers a chance.

For options and pricing, please see the yellow table at the bottom of the section on Explanation and Details below.

Explanation and Details

This page and other parts of DISC's site should provide sufficient knowledge to enable you to ask the right questions of your prospective SEO firm. This site is not an SEM information portal such as SearchEngineWatch.com. It does, however, reflect and share the insight that comes from over ten years of research and practice.

In the SEO industry, WebPositionT reports and server statistics provide a solid gauge of the firm's successes. You should ask to have ROI reports emailed to you.

It is crucial that you ascertain who within the firm would work on your account. Large firms hire many new people and have constant turnover. One of DISC's very satisfied clients had first engaged the world's largest SEM firm and got no results. That firm's results may typically be good, but obviously the team working on this client was not adequate. Go beyond a prospective firm's sales people -- acquire detailed qualifications and client histories of the individuals who will work on your account, and speak with those individuals.

As the SEO industry has matured, tools, processes, and labor time have become somewhat standardized. Therefore, prices for the kind of thorough SEO work that virtually eliminates your risk tend to cluster around the median (DISC’s prices are at the bottom of this and most of this site’s pages). Beware of substantial deviations from average prices - if the price is exceptionally low, the firm is very likely cutting corners or engaging in unethical practices.

Does the firm offer objective feasibility studies to determine whether and how much you should invest in SEO? ROI for SEO is more predictable than you might imagine. An SEO firm that is sincerely committed to your ROI will offer you predictive reports about ROI and other benchmarks.

Should you hire an employee rather than contract with a firm? To make this assessment, you need to know the talents and skills required to do the job well. To help you decide whether to outsource and who to hire, we have reprinted CEO Rob Laporte’s article on outsourcing SEM posted on the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) web site. Please see the reprint on our page about SEM Training.

DISC's SEO Prices

The minimum cost for DISC to implement a complete SEO job for one web site is $4800. This assumes that the site requires no SEO-related redesign or recoding. As some redesign and recoding usually is needed, typical entry-level SEO jobs cost about $6000. DISC's average initial SEO job costs about $11,000.

Some parts of a complete SEO job can be done as a stand-alone service, as noted in the main SEO page. However, a complete SEO job is best.

An initial engagement for larger jobs range from $14,000 to $20,000 per web site. Often larger clients, after seeing our superb results, have DISC do more SEO than initially contracted.

DISC's proposals and phone conversations will provide more details and answer all your questions.

DISC offers rock-solid proof of our years of superb results in all of our services, in the form of detailed ROI reports delivered to actual clients. We need a signed NDA in most cases, so we offer this proof only to people who have received a proposal and remain interested in DISC’s services.

DISC's estimates in our proposals are firm. We do not exceed them unless you add more work. If you have us do work that is not specified in contracts, it is billed at these hourly rates:

  • $75 per hour for HTML programming
  • $100 per hour for graphic design
  • $150 per hour for database work and non-HTML programming
  • $150 per hour for SEO, PPC, and other SEM
  • $150 per hour for general consulting and training
  • To learn about DISC’s pricing philosophy and practice, and our account management structure and workflow, please see our Prices and Procedures page.

For a list of all of DISC's service prices, without descriptions, please our "Sell Sheet."

Please click here to request a proposal. The RFP form takes less than 3 minutes to fill out. Thank you!

 
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